Managing the U.S. Census 2000 and World Development Indicators databases for statistical analysis in Stata

P. Wilner Jeanty
The Kinder Institute for Urban Research
Hobby Center for the Study of Texas
Rice University
Houston, TX
pwjeanty@rice.edu

Abstract. This article introduces a new Stata command, labcenswdi, to automatically
manage databases that provide variable descriptions on the second row
in a dataset. While renaming all variables and converting them from string to
numeric, labcenswdi automatically manages the variable descriptions including
removing them from the second row to place them into Stata variable labels and
saving them to a text file. The process yields a dataset ready for statistical analysis.
I illustrate how this command can be used to efficiently manage datasets obtained
from the U.S. Census 2000 and the World Development Indicators databases.